As somebody who has congenitally shitty handwriting and usually ignores advice to pick up a pencil: it's still helpful when learning a new language. In fact, my natural crappiness becomes helpful because I have to be incredibly mindful in the act of writing to wind up with anything legible.
Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
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Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#42I can believe it. I firmly believe the brain acts very differently between typing and handwriting. I make stupid mistakes all the time when I type. Not misspelling, but those easy there/their/theyre type mistakes. I think it's because I'm just mindlessly trying to express my opinion as fast as possible. I don't write nearly as much as I type, but I've never made such a mistake when writing. Somewhere between the slow…
Wow. Yeah, I never made this connection before.
I type you instead of your frequently, mix up homophones like your/you're and there/their/they're etc. reasonably frequently. I very rarely make these mistakes in hand writing OR on my iPhone; only at the keyboard.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example), handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
This will get easier if you summarise the main points, write quicker (a skill you can practice), and do it with minimal looking down at your page.
There are also lots of techniques to turn notes on paper into something else than a stream of words. For example you could create mind maps, tables, diagrams.
From my personal experience I also found I remembered hand written notes much better than notes I took on the laptop. While learning for tests at university I made it a point to write down the most important points from handouts into s ring book in order to better memorize the content.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example), handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
This will get easier if you summarise the main points, write quicker (a skill you can practice), and do it with minimal looking down at your page.
How do you summarize when you don't know what the main and what the probably unimportant point is?
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#45(n=1 here) Hard disagree. Typing Chinese is so much faster and easier than writing by hand. Sure, I don‘t learn how to write it. But my dopamine-addicted web 5.0 brain would not have kept up with the slow pace of learning by handwriting anyways.
I'm a second-generation Chinese-American who learned my first ~200 Chinese characters by handwriting and then everything else from the internet.
I have no idea how to handwrite half the characters I can recognize, read, and "write" now thanks to typing with a Pinyin or Jyutping keyboard.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#46I wonder if the benefit of handwriting is diminished if the student is using a tablet that converts each handwritten word into text as it is written? Is the benefit just in the act of writing? Does the act of seeing your own handwritten text on a page/screen reinforce the learning?
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#47I wonder if the benefit of handwriting is diminished if the student is using a tablet that converts each handwritten word into text as it is written? Is the benefit just in the act of writing? Does the act of seeing your own handwritten text on a page/screen reinforce the learning?
I wonder this too - I know that I learn much more rapidly and the knowledge "sticks" when I handwrite notes but just anecdotally, I feel like the effect is "lessened" when I handwrite digital notes.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#48> N=42
This is noise.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#49That's great. Alternatively, after a few decades of wishing otherwise, I've accepted that for me the decision is between take notes via typing and don't take notes . I fully get the value of handwriting things. I wish it weren't physically painful for me to write more than a paragraph, but it is, and has been since I was a kid. (And I've tried literally everything I could find to "fix" that. It's not from lack of try…
The thing is, that returning to your notes is the least important part of taking notes. What writing notes longhand does is do a better job of encoding what you're taking notes about into your long-term memory. Anecdata: As part of an ongoing project,¹ I spent about two years teaching myself Biblical Greek. As part of this project, I ended up filling a couple notebooks with handwritten notes—writing out tables of con…
I disagree. Returning to my notes is the most important thing I do.
I just don't have enough space in my working memory for all the content we go through per day, all the different topics. It's fine if you handle a thing or two, but a totally different topic if you're jumping around meeting after meeting.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#50I can believe it. I firmly believe the brain acts very differently between typing and handwriting. I make stupid mistakes all the time when I type. Not misspelling, but those easy there/their/theyre type mistakes. I think it's because I'm just mindlessly trying to express my opinion as fast as possible. I don't write nearly as much as I type, but I've never made such a mistake when writing. Somewhere between the slow…
I wonder if this has to do with how fast typing is. Is there similarly diminished learning in very slow typers? Does a shorthand expert fail to learn as much?